Should it make a difference to investors if a company is owned by its founder? You might argue that a founder-owner would have a deeper interest in the long-term success of his or her corporate creation. Or perhaps having the owner hanging around the management board would inhibit risk taking. But here’s the strange thing: as far as I’ve been able to establish, no studies have ever been done asking if founder (as distinct from family) ownership is a factor in the share performance of various companies. So my colleague Viktoria Lyttkens and I spent six months looking in to it – and the results are quite remarkable.
Our study, ‘How people and founders that are major stockholders influence stock market returns’ written at Stockholm School of Economics, examined 347 companies listed in Stockholm, where we both live. We researched their performance from 2002 to 2010 – a period that takes in good times and bad.
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